AmaLea

AmaLea was christened at Vilshofen on the Danube on May 26, 2018, with Filomena Andre of AAA standing as godmother, and the christening is remembered in the trade press for something other than the ship: it is where AmaWaterways revealed AmaMagna, the double-width Danube vessel that broke the mold the rest of the fleet is built to. AmaLea is the mold. She is 443 feet by roughly 38, a Vahali hull from Zasavica in Serbia, and she is one of nine or ten boats AmaWaterways has built to the identical box because that is the largest thing the locks between Vilshofen and Budapest will pass.

What distinguishes her is not the hardware. It is where she goes and, more strangely, when.

The standard hull, done well

Seventy-eight staterooms in ten categories, 156 guests at double occupancy, fifty-one crew. Four suites at 350 square feet; forty-five twin-balcony staterooms between 210 and 235; eighteen French-balcony rooms; eleven riverview cabins at 155 square feet with high windows that do not open. The twin balcony, a French balcony you open onto the room plus a separate step-out veranda with chairs, is on well over half the ship, and it remains the one structural thing this line offers that most competitors on the same rivers do not.

Four decks named Sun, Violin, Cello and Piano. The Main Restaurant and The Chef’s Table for dining, with tapas and light plates in the Main Lounge; a heated pool with a swim-up bar and a walking track on the Sun Deck; a fitness room, a salon, massage service, and bicycles for riding ashore. The elevator serves the three lower decks and stops below the Sun Deck, which on a Danube itinerary (the Wachau in the late afternoon, the approach into Budapest after dark) is exactly where you want to be standing.

Where she actually sails

Budapest, over and over, from both directions.

Her largest block runs Vilshofen to Budapest in seven nights, the route the entire upper Danube trade is built around: Passau, Linz, the Wachau valley at Melk, Dürnstein and Weissenkirchen, then Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest. Budapest round trips come next, with a few weeks running back to Vilshofen and a few starting at Nuremberg. Budapest itself comes up several times on a single week, which is what happens when a ship overnights at both ends of a week and turns around there.

The other big block is Magnificent Europe, fourteen nights from Budapest to Amsterdam, and this is the one worth understanding. It is not a combination with a ship change. The Danube, the Main-Danube Canal, the Main and the Rhine are one continuous waterway, so the same hull carries you the whole way, and that is why Nuremberg, Bamberg, Würzburg, Wertheim, Rüdesheim, Düsseldorf and Amsterdam all show up in her port data alongside Vienna and Melk. Two weeks, four rivers, one unpacking. Very few itineraries in this database do that.

Her season is the odd part. Across a two-year calendar there is not a single sailing in July, August or September. It clusters in November and December, again in January, February and March, and then in April, May and June, and stops for the summer. Most of the seven-night weeks are sold as City Escapes: The Danube, the line’s cold-weather short-break product, and there are Christmas-market and New Year’s departures plus, unusually, a Lunar New Year sailing.

Two things follow. First, if you want this ship, you are booking a shoulder or winter cruise, and December on the Danube is a genuinely good trip; the Christmas markets in Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest are the reason half the fleet is there. Second, if you want the same route in July, the itinerary exists; it will be operating under a sister’s name. AmaWaterways moves these identical hulls between programs, and the schedule shown here is what is actually loaded against AmaLea, not what a brochure says the class does.

Who she suits

First-time river cruisers who want the canonical Danube week and would rather have a 2018 hull than a 2008 one. Vilshofen to Budapest is the itinerary this industry sells more of than any other, and it earns that: four capitals or near-capitals, the Wachau, and short sailing distances that leave real time ashore. She also suits anyone with two weeks and a dislike of packing, because Magnificent Europe is the rare long river voyage that is genuinely one ship end to end.

She is wrong for anyone who wants a summer cruise, because on this schedule she does not sail in the summer. She is wrong for anyone who wants warmth generally: her densest months are November through March, and a Danube deck in February is a place you visit briefly. She is wrong for travelers who need an elevator to reach everything, since the Sun Deck is up a flight of stairs. And she is wrong for anyone looking for a distinctive ship; she is very good and she is also one of a series, and the reason to choose her over AmaViola or AmaStella is the date on the calendar rather than anything aboard.